The Human Resource Curse: Markets & Merit, Inequality & Decadence

1 credits · Law

We will spend our time together thinking through a series of interlocking transformations in school and work that have, jointly, brought our civilization previously unimaginable prosperity but also new forms of inequality and decadence. A series of intellectual innovations in the 17th century replaced an old order that mis-trusted economic markets with a new civilization that made market measures of merit possible and, eventually, irresistible. Once merit was measured through markets, human capital became intelligible. Schools started to teach useful knowledge and build practical skills - becoming factories for manufacturing human capital at scale. Meanwhile, labor replaced capital as the root of income; and industry replaced leisure as the root of status. The meritocracy that ensued has invented a new version of the familiar natural resource curse. The cursed resource isn't oil, gold, or diamonds, but human capital. Together, meritocratic school and work concentrate income and status in an ever-narrowing class of super-educated, superordinate workers, who dominate an underemployed and stagnating middle class, and who use meritocracy to pass their privilege dynastically down through their families' generations. What are the possibilities for breaking this cycle? What is the connection between meaningful education and work at the level of the individual and democratic equality at the level of society? What methods of schooling and forms of work-organization might reliably bring meaning to individual citizens as students and workers and also promote democratic equality among them? Are these proposals for escaping the human resource curse forward-looking and hard-headedly pragmatic or backward-looking and hopelessly romantic? Elements used in grading: Attendance, class participation, written assignments. Non-Law students may submit a Stanford Non-Law Student Course Add Request Form available at https://law.stanford.edu/education/courses/non-law-students/ to request consent to enroll.